The Shadows of Falling Veils

Walking old trails past the gravel pits - remembering the old dog - and crying hard, blubbering really, like the sad old men I was scared of growing up. We are not what we think we are, nor what we long to be, but something else that neither changes nor knows what change is. How easily the miles fall away in late summer!

We stopped to watch a turkey vulture circle away from us, its vast wings deepening our breath, the way life often does when one understands the nexus between luck and attention. We are saying the same thing but differently and pretending that "differently" matters. We stop at the brook to soak our feet and end up sitting there for hours, not saying much of anything, but happy the way that you can be when you relax your reliance on thought.

One begins to perceive how wanting Jesus is related to defining Jesus and how both obscure - fatally though temporarily - actually learning from Jesus. I still cannot find the words to describe how birds sound when they rise as one from the hay field. Calf bones buried forty-two years ago at about this time may yet be the color of moonlight.

One becomes a traveler by relinquishing their investment in arrival. Often while sitting quietly in Center Cemetery - acres I have mowed, graves I have dug - I reflect on the nature of acquisitiveness, striving without irony for understanding. Eschew theology.

Bear tracks discovered just as the sun rises, a "big 'un" as my grandfather might have said. One says it - makes it manifest in language - and only then perceives their obligation to undo it. Late - but not too late - one learns the sacred art of clearing trails.

The self perceived through language - study "me" and "I" in particular - arrives later and later, doesn't it? The dance floor filling with the shadows of falling veils. She whispered "yes now yes" and it was a sweetness, it was a right settling of one into another.

You pass some towns and others you stop, you buy bread, you walk around in the twilight. I am in bed later than usual, sunlight ascending the northernmost wall, so grateful and happy it came to this.